


A Bit Of A Memento Mori

by einsKai



Category: IDOLiSH7 (Video Game)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, GakuTenn Jesus Kai breaking the bread once again, Growing Up, IDOLiSH7 Flash Bang 2019, Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Philosophy, Slice of Life, Trans Male Character, alternatively titled "YOLO", idk how to tag it's philosophing about life, kinda at least it's scenes, mention of death but nobody dies or anything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 04:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20325451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/einsKai/pseuds/einsKai
Summary: "Time is limited. But it might not be limited to the length of a human life for us. What if time isn’t an endless resource? What if time ended tomorrow, and everything froze, because everything stopped moving?"They're barely not kids anymore when they make up their minds and decide to act.





	A Bit Of A Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

> It's Flashbang time again!
> 
> And that means it's Kai writes GakuTenn time again!
> 
> This time around I was paired up with the wonderful [snakejorts](https://twitter.com/snakejorts) and they also did fantastic [art](https://twitter.com/snakejorts/status/1163854950973284352?s=20) for this fic!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this one, because I really really like it myself :D
> 
> Have fun reading!
> 
> -Kai

It was a sweltering summer night. The air of the day had settled over the land like a blanket trying to suffocate the earth.  
The sky was heavy with stars, and no cloud bothered promising rain, promising release from the awful heat.

Two boys were still up at this late hour. They sat on the roof of the house of the older one of them. It was only eleven months, but he still felt good about being ‘the older one’.  
His room was in the upper story of the house his family lived in, and it was easy to climb out onto the roof to sit there and watch the sky. Even though his mother had scolded him the one time she had caught him.

_“Gaku!”, she had said, angry red dusting her cheeks in ugly blotches. She was always beautiful, but anger just turned her into a different person. Luckily she only got angry seldomly. “Don’t you know how dangerous this could’ve been? You could get hurt! Never go onto the roof again!”_

From then on, he and Tenn had been more careful when it came to climbing onto the roof, but they hadn’t stopped doing it.

“Do you ever think about time?”, Tenn asked out of nowhere.

The answer, put quite simply, would be no.  
They were barely through the shortest part of their lives. He never thought about time – that was something adults did, adults who had to go to work, and had to have kids, and old people who’d be dying soon, who didn’t have much time left. Those were the people who thought about time.  
Not Gaku. Not Tenn.

However…

When the summer ended, Gaku would go back to being a high-school student, while Tenn would still remain in middle-school. They had managed before the holidays and would surely still see each other because they lived close, but maybe it wouldn’t be the same as now.

“Do you mean the summer ending soon?”, he asked.

“That’s not what I meant”, his friend shook his head. In his eyes Gaku saw a reflection of the night sky. Sometimes Tenn scared him. Even though he was younger than him, the other seemed to possess an ancient knowledge. Knowledge older than the universe itself. Somehow it wasn’t weird though. Just quirky. Slightly unusual.

“Between birth and death”, Tenn began, and in the still night his voice, substantially no louder than a whisper, was so ripe with _meaning_ that it was louder than even the turning of the earth that would bring the morning soon. “There is only one life.”

Gaku swallowed. Somehow, he understood. And at the same time, he didn’t.  
But one thing he knew for sure.

Tenn was right.

“Time”, Tenn began. “Time is limited. But it might not be limited to the length of a human life for us. What if time isn’t an endless resource? What if time ended tomorrow, and everything froze, because everything stopped moving? Without time there can’t be _speed_. There is no velocity without time. And we don’t really know anything about time other than that it has existed and exists now. The end of time might occur right now. Would you feel good about yourself if time were to stop right now?”

Gaku thought about it for a while, but he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t imagine a place where he’d rather be frozen in time, or not-time-anymore, than this rooftop under the stars together with Tenn.  
He didn’t dare say that aloud though.

“Did you learn that in school?”, he asked instead. “They sure changed the physics lessons, huh?”

“I did _not_”, Tenn said. “I read a book about it.”

Books didn’t lie, even Gaku knew that.  
Or at least he believed so with his almost sixteen-year-old mind.

“So… what do you wanna do about it then?”, he asked.

Tenn looked at him with those eyes that felt like they were piercing through him. Gaku’s heart fluttered.

“I want to live”, he said.

Gaku waited, because he expected Tenn to say something else, because there was an anticipation there, an electricity, a tension in the air and in the earth, a blank space begging to be filled with words – and not his.

“I want to live”, Tenn repeated. His tone hadn’t changed. “I want to live life to the fullest, because I only get one shot at it.”

“_There is only one life_”, Gaku echoed Tenn’s words.

“Time won’t come again. This night is entirely unique, just as tomorrow is. And so is the day after, and the day after. I want to do everything I can to enjoy every single one of them. And I want to do it with you.”

He reached over to touch Gaku’s hand, and even though it was so hot, so, so warm in the air and in the sky, and the additional human warmth should have repulsed Gaku, he leaned into the touch.

“Well”, he said and grinned. “Let’s _Carpe Diem_ the shit out of our lives then, right?”

And even though Tenn rolled his eyes at his phrasing, he saw the smile his best friend gave him for saying this. For siding with him.

They would do this. Together.

“Jump off the cliff with me.”

The morning had come earlier than they would have thought, and though they had only slept for a few hours after they’d left the roof, somehow last night had been more refreshing than a thousand hours of sleep.

Overnight the world had become a brighter place.

Colours were more vibrant than yesterday, birds sang lovely tunes, a private orchestra just for the two teens, laying centimetres apart in their makeshift beds they always used for these sleepovers, ever since they were children.  
It was as if Gaku’s entire perspective on the world had changed, just like that, with a few words of Tenn’s.

The cliff in question was about 10 metres high, a wall of stone close to their hometown. It was a popular spot for tests of courage and the like, even though it was unofficially prohibited to jump off it.  
Allegedly someone had died there years ago, and ever since parents warned their children to not go there, and _especially_ not to jump off it.

“Okay”, Gaku said without thinking about it for long. Actually, he hadn’t thought at all. They both had talked about wanting to jump off the cliff before – it being their first adventure with this newly acquired view of the world just _made sense_.

They rode their bikes there. It wasn’t far.

The ocean was fantastic. On days before yesterday Gaku might’ve felt disappointed at the dullness of the colour, or the fact that the beach on the left was littered with a mixture of trash and seaweed, but today Gaku felt like it was important to appreciate the moment, not just the scenery.

In the distance a group of seagulls was drifting on top of the water. Peaceful.

“So, how do you wanna do this?”, Gaku looked over at his friend, who was standing close. Tenn looked at the water calmly.

He was contemplating.

“Actually”, he said. “I think it would be easiest to just jump.”

“No thinking and all?”

“No thinking.”

“We can do that.”

“You specifically should be _very_ good at not thinking”, Tenn teased.

“Hey!”, Gaku protested, but he wasn’t hurt. Tenn’s words never hurt him, no matter how mean they were. He knew that they came from a place filled with love.

A stray finger brushed against his knuckles, a silent plea for support.

He complied.

His fingers wrapped around Tenn’s reminded him of previous summers, spent in the woods that they were to explore together, an adventure chasing the other, catching crayfish in the river.  
Hand in hand. Never separated. Together.

Just like this jump.

“On three?”, he asked. They hadn’t even brought swimming clothes. Just taken off their shoes and left them with their bikes.

Tenn looked at their hands, clasped together. Then he looked at Gaku, and then the ocean below.

He nodded. “On three.”

“One.”

Gaku thought about how much he liked Tenn.

“Two.”

Tenn was his best friend. If they ever were to grow apart Gaku didn’t know what he’d do.

He squeezed Tenn’s hand for assurance.  
Tenn squeezed back.

“Three.”

He never wanted to be without Tenn, Gaku thought, and–

Jumped.

He felt the pull on his hand during the fall – Tenn was with him.

The water broke for them like it was made to do so.

In a flurry of bubbles Gaku opened his eyes.

Tenn was floating in the water, his hair dancing around his face like a halo, bubbles for wings. Angelic.

He was grinning, the spark of adrenaline in his eyes and smile spreading to him and igniting Gaku’s heart in something new and unknown to him prior to the jump.

“I love him”, Gaku thought, and there was a gravity to this thought that was stronger than the one that had just let him crash through the surface of the water.

Together they swam up, towards the sun.

When they broke the surface of the water Gaku’s smile mirrored Tenn’s.

“We were immortal for a moment”, Tenn said cryptically, but Gaku knew _exactly_ what he meant. He felt the urge to pull Tenn close. He resisted.

Their clothes stuck to their bodies when they got out of the water, but when they had reached their bikes the sun’s heat had dried them halfway already, and as they cycled home a warm breeze finished the job.

They said goodbye at a crosswalk, and Gaku got home when the sun was slowly beginning its way down towards the horizon.

Despite having half of the day left, he sat down on his bed and thought about the implication of this new revelation.

An angel, he thought, framing the image of that perfect Tenn under water in his mind.  
Hair fanned out like a halo.  
Bubbles for wings.

“Trust me, it’s going to work out just fine”, he said and pulled his friend along.

It was the middle of the night before Gaku’s seventeenth birthday, and the crescent moon was the only source of light at the abandoned factory.

Nobody really knew when the factory had actually been used to manufacture something, but it had never been demolished, and the land hadn’t been bought.  
Rumour was that it was haunted.  
Gaku personally suspected that it was used as a kind of hotspot for addicts of various more or less legal substances.

Tenn hadn’t wanted to go.

Even though they had done various things that they wouldn’t have dared thinking about before they had come up with their personal definition of Carpe Diem (though Gaku sometimes thought that it was more of a Memento Mori, positive nihilism that made their hearts beat with meaning, with passion, and made them appreciate the world and life more than any other feeling ever could) this one was the most risky so far.

_The last had been the day they had snuck out early in the morning to join a pride parade in the city hours away. _

_How they had been sitting in the train, close, hushed, their presence a whisper as opposed to the scream hidden in their backpacks, folded neatly._

_Loud – Electric Red, Dark Orange, Canary Yellow, La Salle Green, Blue, Patriarchy. _

_Loud – Maya Blue, Amaranth Pink, White._

It would be the first time they actually did something illegal – and Tenn was not having it.

“Gaku”, he whispered. In the silence of the night even the whisper was loud.

“What”, he answered.

“We can’t do this.”

“Why not? It’s not like there’s anyone here who could call the police. I’m not gonna get arrested first thing on my birthday.”

“That’s not _it_”, Tenn hissed.

Gaku stopped in his tracks.

He turned around to look at Tenn.  
There was something in his posture, in his breath, and in his eyes that let Gaku’s zeal die.

Moments ago, he had been absolutely sure that he could just convince Tenn to come with him. Doing some things that weren’t exactly allowed was just something teenagers did, why would it be different for them?  
A little ‘what if earth stops spinning’ here, a ‘what if a manmade plague wipes out humanity’ there – usually the thing that’d convince either of them to do anything. At times they’d come up with apocalyptic scenarios just for fun. It was like a game, they both liked it.

But this wasn’t about it being illegal.

Looking at Tenn now, Gaku wondered how he hadn’t seen it earlier, when he had first mentioned the old factory.

Tenn was _terrified_.

“Are you okay?”

The blurted-out question felt stupid. Gaku could _see_ that Tenn wasn’t okay in the slightest.  
Yet Tenn somewhat relaxed at the question. The knowledge that Gaku knew that something was up was a relief.

Tenn swallowed.

“Have you heard the rumours?”, when Gaku waited for Tenn to elaborate, he began talking.

“Don’t laugh now”, he said, as if Gaku could ever. “But the rumours about the factory being haunted are true. Riku and I went here as kids, someone dared us.” Tenn rubbed his arms, as if to chase away goosebumps and bad memories. “Riku… He can _see_ them. And they’re here. And they don’t like visitors.”

Tenn’s twin Riku could see ghosts.  
Gaku didn’t really believe in ghosts in general, but when Riku talked about them it was difficult not to. And Tenn always trusted Riku, no questions asked. Probably came with being twins – and Riku being a truly sweet person and absolutely unable to lie.

Gaku nodded. He reached out to squeeze Tenn’s shoulder.

“I made up my mind”, he said.

Tenn blinked at him as if he had just seen an alien. Gaku grinned, as if to say ‘see, even I can change my mind if the one I love the most on this planet is feeling uncomfortable.’

“We’re not going. We’ll just have to have the Adventure-Midnight-Picnic I prepared somewhere else.”

“Adventure-Midnight-Picnic…”, Tenn echoed. “This is what this was all about?” You just wanted to eat birthday cake somewhere exciting?”

The relief washed over Tenn like a wave, and Gaku could see the tension physically being smoothed out of his muscles.

They ate at the cliff, shortly after midnight, their legs dangling over the edge – the ocean an endless black abyss below them, purring: a tamed beast.

Fearlessness, Gaku thought, fearlessness and recklessness weren’t what _their_ Carpe Diem was about.

Graduation came for Gaku and he left school with a certificate feeling heavier than it should be, and a button less on his uniform. He had given it to Tenn without a word and hoped that he would understand.

It was never mentioned again, not until months later, on a nice weekend in fall.

Without a warning Tenn was standing outside of Gaku’s dorm room. He had been running, Gaku could see his chest heaving, and there was a desperation in his eyes that Gaku hadn’t seen before. He had only heard it in ‘what if’s and hushed deadly scenarios under the night sky. He had felt it in his own heart.

Gaku was in the most casual getup he could be in. No binder, his chest not concealed by tank top and shorts. He’d never let anyone but Tenn see him like this.

“What are you doing here”, it wasn’t a question.

“I just”, Tenn took a deep breath. He clutched something under his shirt. Gaku could see a filigree chain around Tenn’s neck. “I just really needed to see you.”

They had been texting, but it wasn’t the same as seeing each other.

“Come in”, he said, his voice gentler than he had intended

He had missed Tenn too.

Tenn dropped his bag to the floor next to the desk. There wasn’t much in Gaku’s room but his bed, desk and closet, but Tenn looked around like he was entering some great royal castle.

“Want something to drink?”, Gaku asked in lack of anything else to say. He kind of wanted to hug Tenn, but he didn’t know if it would be off limits. Tenn beat him to making the first actual move.

“If the sun were to implode tomorrow”, he began, and suddenly Gaku understood, he understood why Tenn was here, and he understood that what he kept on that chain around his neck was Gaku’s uniform button.

He didn’t let Tenn continue.

“I’d regret never being able to hold you close and tell you how much I really love you”, Gaku said. He opened his arms.

Tenn, still in full streetwear, shoes and jacket, and everything, _flung_ himself at Gaku.  
The embrace was everything Gaku had ever dared to dream of, Tenn pressed against him, his hair in his face and laughter, _so much laughter_.

Free and light, just expressing their happiness.

_Finally._

The happiness seeped from the button on the chain and soaked through them, the warmth of them finally being true to themselves and admitting that they loved each other so, so much, all their little imperfections perfect in the other’s eyes. Even this clumsy, desperate hug was _just right_.

“I love you”, Gaku breathed. “I love you more than there are stars in the night sky, I love you more than there is sand on all beaches, I love you mo–“

“Do shut up”, Tenn said. “You don’t need to prove it to me with words.”

And Gaku thought that if the sun imploded tomorrow, he’d also severely regret not kissing Tenn right now.

So he did.

Outside the winter was rampaging calmly.

The window showing the snowy scene had been covered in frost this morning. The frost had fled when confronted with the heat from the open fire in their fireplace, of course far enough from the Christmas tree.  
They had cut the tree themselves, driven to a place that offered it on a whim and gotten this small, crooked tree. It hadn’t been too expensive for them, and was small enough to fit in their car, and it had been fun cutting it, even though none of them really celebrated Christmas.

Gaku looked over at his boyfriend. In his early twenties Tenn had grown a lot, and as of now nobody would describe him as “cute” anymore. He was more on the “handsome” site, just like Gaku.

Of course, his looks changed nothing about how much Gaku loved him.

“Hey Gaku”, Tenn said from his position on the couch, nestled against Gaku’s side, Gaku’s hand tangled in his hair. Comfortable.

“Hm?”, Gaku’s tongue was lazy today.

“What if time wasn’t an endless resource, and ended tomorrow-“, he said. Gaku recognized this. It had been the very first.

“…and everything froze, because there is no velocity without time”, he continued Tenn’s words. “Yes?”

“You’re turning thirty next year”, Tenn said instead of continuing the apocalyptic talk. “Is there anything you want to do before?”

Gaku didn’t have to think for long.

“I want to get married to you”, he said, calmly, with the same tone as he had almost teasingly completed Tenn’s sentence just now.

A sharp intake of air next to him. He didn’t worry though. This wasn’t a breath of rejection, it was a breath that said: ‘I expected you to say ‘parachuting’ or ‘bungee jumping’, not ‘getting married’’.

Tenn next to him shifted impalpably.

Then, in the softest voice Gaku had ever heard him use, he answered:

“Alright. Let’s do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> The flashbang will end today, so make sure that you check out all the other works in the collection!
> 
> If you want to talk to me you can do so on my [twitter](https://twitter.com/eins_kai) or [tumblr](https://einskai.tumblr.com/)~
> 
> Have a nice day!
> 
> \- Kai


End file.
